This is one case where I think Windows is appropriately designed for its target audience.
macOS also does this by default, but you can change it (though you have to reformat the disk in question). This is generally fine for non-system disks if you REALLY need it for some reason, but afaik it is not recommended for the OS disk due to assumptions that macOS-targeted binaries make (similar to the windows regex version matching that caused problems for a while because it became the unofficial best way to check windows versions for app install compatibility). It’s doubly annoying on newer Apple systems because the integrated SSDs are WAY faster than pretty much anything else you can connect to it. But for the most part, I find it’s more of a nuisance to keep in mind than a real problem (I’ve been dealing with dev-issue MBPs since about 2012).
As in the windows case, this is also an appropriate choice for the average Apple user (though the fact that they’re fairly ubiquitous as dev machines in many places is annoying on several levels, despite the generally solid best-case performance and thermals I’ve observed).
Huh I had thought case-sensitive was default on APFS/HPFS and you had to choose insensitive specifically but I guess not
Just checked on my work box - if you go into Disk Utility and start the process to add a volume, the default selection is
APFS, and there’s an option in the dropdown for forAPFS (Case-sensitive)
This isn’t “Windows design”… this is just inherited stone age bullshit from the DOS days when the filesystem was FAT16 and all file names were uppercase 8.3.
NTFS is case sensitive in its underlying design, but was made case insensitive by default, yet case preserving, for reasons of backwards compatibility.
If Microsoft has to design something from scratch, without the need for backwards compatibility, they go for case sensitive themselves. For example: Azure Blob Storage has case sensitive file names.
If you rename a file only changing the casing it doesn’t update properly, you need to rename it to something else and back.
This is so userfriendly I have been stumped by it multiple times.On the other hand in using Linux I have had a number of problems with the casing of files: The number is 0
If you rename a file only changing the casing it doesn’t update properly, you need to rename it to something else and back. This is so userfriendly I have been stumped by it multiple times.
To my great surprise, this has been fixed. I don’t know when, but I tried it on my Windows 10 VM and it just worked. Only took them 20 years or so :)
I don’t really see the benefit of allowing users to create files with the same name in the same directory, yeah, yeah I know that case sensitivity means that it isn’t same name, but imagine talking to a user, guiding them to open the file /tmp/doc/File and they open /tmp/doc/file instead
The reason, I suspect, is fundamentally because there’s no relationship between the uppercase and lowercase characters unless someone goes out of their way to create it. That requires that the filesystem contain knowledge of the alphabet, which might work if all you wanted was to handle ASCII in American English, but isn’t good for a system which needs to support the whole world.
In fact, the UNIX filesystem isn’t ASCII. It’s also not unicode. UNIX uses arbitrary byte strings, with special significance given to a very small number of bytes (just ‘/’ and ‘\0’, I think). That means people are free to label files in whatever way they like, and their terminals or other applications are free to render them in whatever way seems appropriate, without the filesystem having to understand unicode.
Adding case insensitivity would therefore actually be significant and unnecessary complexity to add to the filesystem drivers, and we’d probably take a big step backwards in support for other languages
Oh, I realize why it is, I just don’t see it as an advantage, the whole argument is just a technical one, not a usabillity one.
And i hate it being case sensitive
And I love it.
Yeah, right? Are we pretending that having case sensitive file names isn’t a bad call, or…? There are literally no upsides to it. Is that the joke?
I’m with you here, i find it infuriating and i never ever had the situation where this was beneficial.
Like who tf actually creates a File.txt, file.txt AND FILE.TXT in one place and actually differentiates them with that.
I mean, it’s less of an issue on Linux for both design and user profile reasons, but imagine a world where somebody can send all the normie Windows users a file called Chromesetup.exe to sit alongside ChromeSetup.exe. Your grandma would never stop calling you to ask why her computer stopped working, ever.
Who sends setup binaries? I would tell my grandma to install it from the repository.
Yeah I’ve been using Linux for a very long time. The amount of time I’ve spent on the case being incorrect is non-trivial. I’ve gotten better at not screwing it up throughout the years but the sum of advantages is far outweighed by the sum of debugging time spent.
Case sensitivity is so much of a problem, that in college, people were always told to keep all their filenames all lowercase, to avoid issues with them.
That’s the “getting better at not screwing up” part.
thank god it’s not case sensitive holy shit. i don’t understand the kind of person who would see that as a positive.
Seriously.
It sounds like a fucking nightmare. Imagine working on something for days and it refuses to work cause you accidentally capitalized 1 file name and dont notice it?
That sounds like the kind of shit they’d do in tech hell.
We regularly have that problem at work. Works on your development PC on Windows. Push to pipeline, get cryptic error messages. Once we were two people trying to figure it out for half an hour.
Case-sensitive file names. Why.
That’s why you never ever write the filename manually. Always copy paste it!
You can’t even clone the Linux kernel on windows because of filenames
What a tragedy
oh for fucks sake, don’t make me have to worry about the case of filenames.
I prefer case sensitive but I guess that’s just me
Even more annoying is that it’s very cumbersome to change the case of a file once you’ve created it.
If you accidentally create
fIle.txtwhen you meantFile.txt, the rename function does nothing … and it will keep displaying asfIle.txt. You have to rename it to something else entirely, then rename it back to the original name with the intended case.It’s neat that Linux has the ability to do this, but I honestly can’t think of a good usecase for this. I think this is more confusing than it is useful
Git likes to have a word with you.
Command ‘Git’ not found
I think if you can write them in two different ways it should consider them two different things
It’s quite useful for stuff like PROGRAM and Program in the same directory where PROGRAM is the program itself and Program is some unrelated files about the program. Bad example, but the case stands.
So what you’re telling me is that it’s useful when the software you use is made by absolute idiots?
It’s not about software. Program, PROGRAM were just placeholders for content. I know you can think more abstract and argue in better faith than this.
Replace ‘software’ by w/et placeholder thing
I can make a file named COM1 on Linux. That’s on the forbidden list for Windows.
The forbidden list:
- CON
- PRN
- AUX
- CLOCK$
- NUL
- COM1
- COM2
- COM3
- COM4
- COM5
- COM6
- COM7
- COM8
- COM9
- LPT1
- LPT2
- LPT3
- LPT4
- LPT5
- LPT6
- LPT7
- LPT8
- LPT9
That’s because Windows is generally very backwards compatible.
So is Linux, but it puts stuff like that in /dev
The thing is, a lot of the legacy backwards compatible stuff that’s in Linux is because a lot of things in Unix were actually pretty well thought out from the get go, unlike many of the ugly hacks that went into MSDOS and later Windows and overstayed their welcome.
Things like: long case sensitive file names from the beginning instead of forced uppercase 8.3 , a hierarchical filesystem instead of drive letters, “everything is a file” concept, a notion of multiple users and permissions, pre-emptive multitasking, proper virtual memory management instead of a “640k is enough” + XMS + EMS, and so on.
It still amazes me how well thought out unix was for the era when computing was in its infancy. But I guess that is what you get with computer science nerds from Universities and a budget for development based on making a product the goal, not quarterly profit the goal.
It’s what you get when you design an OS for a mainframe computer that is accessed by many users sharing its resources.
DOS was designed for single-user PC’s with very limited processing power, memory and storage, and no access to networked drives. Lots of its hacks and limitations saved a few hundred bytes of memory, which was crucial at the time.
Is it just me or is that more of a hinderance?
I honestly don’t get why everyone is agreeing with Windows on this one. I just love how explicit Linux is.
file.txt is fucking file.txt. Don’t do any type extra magic. Do exactly as I’m saying. If I say “open file.txt”, it is “open file.txt”, not “open File.txt”.
The feature isn’t being able to create filenames with the same name, nobody does that. The feature is how explicit it is.
It would be so confusing to read some code trying to access FILE.TXT and then find the filesystem has file.txt
The meme faces are backwards on this one.
I sometimes run into this when I extract an archive file on Windows and there are files named with different cases but are otherwise the same. I prefer case-sensitivity because I like precision and fewer assumptions being made about a system and how it’s used.
